What to do with the Space Station
It was more than 23 years ago that U.S. President Ronald Reagan directed NASA to build a space station within a decade. It will take another three or four years before NASA pronounces the space station complete. Today John Glenn lamented that we will be losing a major investment in the space station.
I have mixed feelings about the space station. In 1992, when its future was in doubt (and no hardware had been launched, 8 years after the initial directive to NASA), I wrote Congress against the space station arguing that a return to the Moon would be a more sensible effort for the manned space program. The Moon has some major advantages over the space station as a permanent manned outpost, the most obvious one being that it is permanent itself. Low-Earth-orbit, which is only marginally easier to access than the Moon, has the disadvantage of the Earth’s upper atmosphere which causes orbits to decay. Furthermore, the infrastructure of an orbiting space station is not exactly rock solid, while the Moon is exactly rock solid.
At any rate, the congressional debate on space station funding in Congress in 1992 was cast in terms of support for the space program as a whole, rather than the space station versus some other ambitious manned space program. Such initiatives obviously require presidential backing. Although Bush the 41st had proposed human exploration of Mars, it did not have the specificity or urgency of Bush the 43rd’s exploration initiative of January 2004. So the space station got the go-ahead, and now there actually is something up there. Along the way, however, plans for a permanent crew of six were dumped when no one felt like paying for a new lifeboat vehicle that would guarantee a safe return to Earth for six residents of the station. The lifeboat for the space station is therefore a Soyuz capsule with a capacity of three. One problem with this is that it takes almost all the manpower of three astronauts just to take care of space station housekeeping and maintenance, leaving virtually no astronaut time available for scientific research, ostensibly the reason for building the thing in the first place.
A second problem is that once the station started to take form and Bush 43 stated that we would instead go to the Moon, all money for research on the space station was redirected to the new exploration initiative. Here is where my mixed feelings enter the picture. Once it was clear that we were going to build a space station I decided I might as well take advantage of it. I received significant funding for two microgravity research projects, one on the origin of planets and one on the behavior of dust in the solar system, which seemed to be heading toward experiments on the space station. However, the lack of funding, access to the station (virtually every pound of payload going to the space station is allocated to hardware to build the thing), and crew time resulted in cancellation of those projects and indeed the entire microgravity research program.
So, in the end, as Senator Glenn points out, we will have invested some tens of billions of dollars in a giant orbiting infrastructure and then direct our attention to a new giant piece of infrastructure, namely the Orion/Ares system for going back to the Moon. What to do with the Space Station? It basically looks like ESA and the other international partners are going to inherit it, so the scientific utilization of the facility, as well as the continued maintenance, may well become primarily a European and Russian operation. Europe has recently expressed renewed interest in developing the capability to launch astronauts, and the space station may be an attractive orbiting asset for them. I have European colleagues still working on experiments that they hope to fly to the station in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping they get the chance.